Kremlin-Backed Nashi Admits Cyberattacking Estonia

Members of a Kremlin-backed youth movement
have claimed responsibility for May 2007 cyber attacks that crippled Estonia's
internet in the midst of a diplomatic argument with Russia, Financial Times
reports.

It is believed to have been the first attack of its kind, directed against
virtually the entire informational infra-structure of a Nato country.

Estonian officials said the attacks originated in Russia. They began after
April 27, when Estonia removed a second world war Soviet memorial from its
capital, Tallinn, provoking a storm of protest from Moscow. They continued to
mid May.

Russia has consistently denied any involvement. Yesterday, however,
Konstantin Goloskokov, a "commissar" in the youth group Nashe, which works for
the Kremlin, told the Financial Times that he and some associates had launched
the attack, which appears to be the first time anyone has claimed
responsibility.

"I wouldn't have called it a cyber attack; it was cyber defence," he
said.

"We taught the Estonian regime the lesson that if they act illegally, we will
respond in an adequate way."

The attack, according to computer experts, was a distributed
denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack, which is when hundreds or thousands of
"zombie" computers are enlisted to overwhelm the target network.

"We were attacked by 178 countries," quipped Katrin Pargmae, a spokeswoman
for the Estonian Informatics Centre, which administer's the state's information
systems, including the internet.

Internet security experts said that the attacks on Estonia were actually tiny
compared with the largest recorded attacks.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks, an internet security company, is an expert on
the Estonian attacks and said they measured about 100MB per second of traffic,
compared with the largest recorded attacks of 40GB per second.

He said that generating such an attack was quite simple, requiring "just a
lot of people getting together and running the same tools on their home
computers".

Mr Goloskokov said: "We did not do anything illegal. We just visited the
various internet sites, over and over, and they stopped working.

"We didn't block them: they were blocked by themselves because of their own
technical limitations in handling the traffic they encountered."

He denied that he and his associates were acting on the orders of the Russian
government. "We did everything based on our own initiative," he said.

Nashe is a privately financed youth movement and the brainchild of the
Kremlin's chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov.

Sergei Markov, a parliamentarian and Mr Goloskokov's boss, volunteered the
information that one of his assistants had planned and implemented the attack at
a conference earlier this month.

"As far as I know this is the first time anyone has claimed responsibility,"
said Pargmae, who added that the matter was being handled by the Estonian
police. Nazario said that Nato had created a cyber defence centre in Estonia
last year.